The urban skyline is the cities most enticing advertisement. Like the individual, the city is most likely to be noticed or recognized if it has an attractive appearance. Modern metropolises preen their skylines that they might lure in the profit potential coming from business and commerce, in all of its various forms.

Tourists gaze upwards in awe of urban architecture and are sure to send postcards featuring the skyline of the city they are visiting to all of their friends and relatives. Magnetically affixed to refrigerators worldwide, these mini advertisements are sure to keep the tourists coming until long after there is nothing left to banalize. Bridges and skyscrapers are the cities main form of flattery, but a truly savvy metropolitan center will utilize geography as well.  A city such as Chicago, being as flat as paper, has little to offer geographically speaking. Lake Michigan offers a certain amount of appealing natural accompaniment to the cities pretty face, but it is really just another interminable featureless plane like the city itself. (Or maybe just a narcissist’s mirror.) Chicago has then had to put a lot of additional effort into attaining winsome cosmopolitan allure. Fully utilizing its broad shoulders, Chicago bedizened itself with the world’s tallest skyscrapers. This might not be the most original or inspired way to get noticed, but with no other options really, Chicago has made it work quite well. In Contrast, San Francisco, like most Californians, didn’t have to work so hard. A natural celebrity, blessed with a hilly mediterranean clime, meant that not much had to be done really. The city was born in a bed of gold and it built a bridge to prove it.

Tourism alone, however, is never an end for most cities. Tourist traps like Lake Havasu City, AZ and Key West, FL never experience any truly significant amount of commercial growth. Las Vegas may be an exception, but the tourism there is fueled by gaming, a much more lucrative commercial endeavor that has spawned the growth of other commercial sectors. 

A pretty face may win over the tourists, but it is a handsome, chiseled jaw line that will effectively win over the corporations, investors, and entrepreneurs. Here again architecture and geography have there places, but for different reasons. Big name businesses desire to have glossy skyscrapers bear their name, as do millionaire moguls such as Donald Trump and Steve Wynn. Modern and Post Modern architecture, intrusive rigid blocks of polished glass and steel, signify a shrewd, manly, all business countenance. With elevations reaching 1000 plus feet, these erect modern marvels host innumerable white collars and firm handshakes daily. But few cities can attract big name world capitalists. The more wealth the city can attract, the flashier it can build its skyline, and consequentially, its thoroughfares, parks, housing units, and cultural institutions. This, in turn will attract more wealth.

Just like the common citizen who takes pride in their hometown, commercial outlets can use big city appeal when promoting their products. American auto manufacturers still take pride in there American roots, though most of them have left long ago. Taking this strategy to a newer demographic, American Apparel came up with a novel business strategy blatantly utilizing the urban American image. The company famously prides itself on its Los Angeles residency and Vertically Integrated Manufacturing. Appropriately, young post blasé urban style distinguishes its easily recognizable clothing line. This however is an exception to the movement that has been taking place in America known as deindustrialization. Industry has given way to a service based economy. American Apparel, marketing to a specifically urban youth, utilized the “industrial” appeal of punk underground subculture to not only create a look, but also a business philosophy and site specific campaign.

The rest of the country however, with some other small exceptions, has deindustrialized, the work force being kicked out of the factory, replaced by mechanization, or something... This sounds like it ought to be a welcomed relief to the endlessly mundane toil of factory life. Finally the machines are doing the work for us while we enjoy our newly found abundance of free time. Of course this is not the case in capitalist society. The wealthy will always need a workforce to exploit, and the toil that the machines were supposed to relieve is probably just taking place elsewhere. Maybe China. Maybe Taiwan. Wherever it is, it is without a doubt somewhere far away. This has appropriately marshaled in the service-based economy that distinguishes American cities today. This change has allowed the aesthetic properties of the American city to be addressed with even more scrutiny. Industrial cities have never been known for their beauty. Manchester’s punk scene took the racket of the industrial city and made a music genre out of it. Most, other than a few adamantly creative individuals such as these, however, have been unable to creatively deal with the harsh reality of urban industry. Finding a more suitable place, one with a cheaper work force proved to be the winning solution. And so with industry being pushed out of America, the new American work force can be likened to a battalion of urban beauticians pampering to the needs of one another to the brink of exhaustion, at which point roles are then alternated. This peculiar exchange between clerk and consumer takes place daily, often in localities formerly used for industrial pursuits. Abandoned manufacturing plants and industrial corridors are gentrified, converted into hip urban districts lined with artist’s lofts, condominiums, cafes, restaurants and retail boutiques. These shops bedizen the city with cosmopolitan style, like urban fashion accessories that confirm our cultural importance. Culture, the commodity that sells all others, has made discretionary income compulsory.

It is not an insignificant observation to note how little direct, or even indirect influence most of us have ever wielded, in fact, been allowed to wield, on the urban environments in which we reside. If one owns a house, a few small desirable modifications can be made possibly. Similarly, the small business owners voice can faintly be heard somewhere within the grand urban commercial cacophony. City building codes, however, greatly restrict what can be done and who can do it. Most of us passively maneuver the streets of our hometowns watching corporations and developers do as they please to the structures and avenues that we observe and utilize daily. The visual appearance of every city is the ad hoc work of commercial hierarchs. Urban planners and politicians bend and shape to rules according to the demands of these wealthy narcissists who fill the void spaces we call city blocks with sky scraping monuments to themselves.